When your reporting beat becomes personal

Editor's Note: This essay appeared in Cognoscenti's newsletter of ideas and opinions, delivered weekly on Sundays. To become a subscriber, sign up here.

As you probably know, Cog is part of WBUR, Boston’s NPR station. We sit in WBUR’s newsroom — though as a journalistic institution, Cog is editorially independent. Our newsroom colleagues don’t tell us which political commentaries and personal essays to publish; our small but mighty team gets to decide.

And every so often we have the opportunity to publish an essay by one of our colleagues. Over the years, we’ve heard from All Things Considered host Lisa Mullins, who wrote about her partner Ken and the solar eclipse. Reporter Simón Rios wrote about a Grateful Dead jam session to honor his friend. Associate producer Amy Sokolow wrote about her love of theater camp and Christine Willmsen, the managing editor of WBUR’s investigations team, wrote about a “jewelry” tree, her new holiday tradition.

Writing an essay, especially a personal one, is quite different from reporting a news story. The essays Cog publishes are sometimes about big stories in the news cycle (and sometimes not) but they almost always require our writers to reflect on their experiences and share something of themselves.

This week we had the chance to do that work with Martha Bebinger, a long-time correspondent at WBUR who often covers health care. Martha is the sort of person who quietly knits through most of an all-staff meeting, but then pops up her hand with the most insightful question.

Her work has won dozens of regional and national journalism awards, including for this 2023 piece about the opioid crisis and one mother’s extraordinary efforts to keep her child alive. The piece is a feat of reporting. It makes it possible to comprehend something as overwhelming and statistic-laden as the opioid crisis. And you can see (and hear) in every line how Martha’s care and curiosity feeds her journalism.

In that 2023 piece, she shared the stories of Renae and her daughter Brooke, who left home at 16, and was using opioids regularly by 18. I’m lingering on this reporting because it demonstrates the command of the opioid epidemic Martha has as a journalist. “Renae often didn't know where [Brooke] was or whether she was alive or dead,” Martha writes. Eventually Renae reckons with judgement and sadness she feels as a mother, and determines that keeping Brooke alive is her one goal, an aim that requires her to rethink her role as a parent. Renae does things she never thought she’d do – stockpiling Narcan and buying needles. Over time, she opens her own home-based supervised consumption site, where some 200 people come to stay safe while using illegal drugs. It’s a story that challenges what we understand about drug use and addiction, and how to help people with substance use disorder.

What I didn’t realize until very recently, is how personal the opioid crisis is to Martha. Her nephew, her beloved Austen, struggled with an addiction to pain pills on and off for more than a decade. He died about a year ago, at 29, alone in a borrowed car in a gas station parking lot across the street from a hospital. “On some level, Austen knew the risk he was taking in those wee morning hours, but opioids had hijacked his brain,” she writes. “This time there was enough fentanyl in whatever Austen took to kill him.”

Martha wrote this brave and raw essay with the intention of honoring her nephew and his memory. Even more so, she wanted to remind people of how shame can interfere with our actions — even when we’re experts on the topic at hand, even when we know the right thing to do. Sometimes there is a disconnect between our reasoning minds and our emotional ones that we can’t see in the moment. I bet we can all remember a scenario when that’s been the case.

My co-editor Sara Shukla worked with Martha on this essay. And Sara told me that during the edit, they talked about nature being a healing balance to the things we can’t control – which in the news business these days is pretty much everything. It’s crucial in these unnerving times to “touch trees,” as Martha might say.

I took it to heart this week. Last Tuesday night, under clear, cold skies, I sat out with friends around the firepit in our backyard. With music playing and drinks in hand, we said farewell to winter and hello to spring. The world still spins, the seasons still change — that’s one constant we can rely on.

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